Jury Tampering

Talk story about con artist Joey Skaggs. There's a new hot-button issue in the American legal community these days: computerized juries. An artificial-intelligence expert named Dr. Joseph Bonuso recently announced that he and his colleagues at New York University Law School had successfully completed work on the Solomon Project--a computer program that, using "voice-stress analysis" of courtroom testimony and a process called "fuzzy logic," arrives at trial verdicts. When Dr. Bonuso made public the results of the program's verdicts in some notorious cases...he was roundly denounced by attorneys and judges, embraced by talk-radio hosts, and enthusiastically covered by mainstream media outlets like... CNN. But...take heed: the Solomon Project is a hoax--another score for the performance artist and media prankster Joey Skaggs. Skaggs...says that the Solomon Project was meant as a serious commentary on our judicial system and, specifically, on the Simpson trial... Initially, N.Y.U. offered to help publicize the Solomon Project, but after the school discovered that no Joseph Bonuso taught there, its attorneys threatened legal action. Skaggs, meanwhile, was em-boldened by the number of responses and, as Dr. Bonuso, began to take phone calls and grant interviews... Eventually, producers from CNN tracked him down. Skaggs was delirious: television is a hoaxter's promised land. He borrowed an office full of computers, got twenty-five actors to staff them or play reporters, and enlisted programmers to design something...to put on the computer screens... Two days later, after taping angry responses from some lawyers, CNN ran the segment on "PrimeNews." The story was aired repeatedly on "Headline News," and a multimedia version is still posted at CNN's World Wide Web site. It turns out that the reading public is more skeptical than the media...

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